Europe seems to be on holiday this week and in North America it’s the unofficial last week of summer. But in the world of Big Data there’s no time for reclining or relaxing. Though we can’t cover everything, here are a few bits of news we find worth mentioning.

Hadoop 2.x is in beta

Hats off to the Apache Hadoop community. They’ve built a release that is supposed to be significantly more stable and that includes YARN, a new open source component that improves Hadoop performance and extends it beyond batch MapReduce processing. For the non-geeks among us, the beta release of Hadoop 2.x is a milestone because it brings a more mature framework to market which should, in turn, mean wider adoption of Hadoop at the Enterprise level.

It might be of interest to CMSWire readers who are curious about Open Source software to check out how the Apache Hadoop Open Source project works. The software is built by a community of committers which is made up of non-paid volunteers. This means that no commercial entity “owns” or has sole governance over Hadoop’s code; in fact, the Hadoop project management committee is made up of of employees from companies as diverse as Cloudera, Facebook, Hortonworks, Huawei, InMobi, Jive, Linkedin, Microsoft, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Yahoo and Wandisco.

Needless to say, not all of the companies who employ Apache Hadoop project volunteers generate revenue via providing products and services around it. The opposite is also true, there are commercial entities whose existence centers around Apache Hadoop that have little to no participation in the Open Source project; in fact, as of this posting, some have no mention of Hadoop 2.0 on their websites or blogs.

Not all Open Source software is developed primarily by volunteers or volunteers who get their paychecks from a variety of companies. There are projects where the code is written entirely (or almost entirely) by a single vendor whose employees are paid to write code and where a commercial entity, rather than a diversified project management committee, scrutinizes and approves the code. Though bug-fixes are often written by the community, they are sometimes applied to the commercial Enterprise edition before the free Community edition.

The point here is that not all Open Source solutions play by the same rules. If you’re looking at Open Source software for the Enterprise, make sure you understand what you’re looking at.

Couchbase Gets A Pile Of Dough

Couchbase, a commercial software entity that develops and provides commercial packages and support for Couchbase Server, an open-source, NoSQL, document-oriented database, received 25 million in new funding this week. “We weren’t planning to raise more money until early 2014,” says Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase, but a number of VC’s were apparently so impressed by the success of the company’s 2.0 release (delivered last December) that they wanted “in” on the game.

The valuations they (the VC’s) offered were very compelling,” says Wiederhold, “so we decided to take the money now rather than wait and spend a lot of management time raising money in the future.”

What are they going to do with the dollars? Invest in product development for Enterprise customers and use it to more aggressively expand distribution and support channels around the world according to Wiederhold. They have been primarily focused on North America and Europe up until now (though they also have distribution and support channels in Israel, Japan and Korea), so the money will enable them to invest more heavily in each of these regions as well as open new offices in places like China, India, Brazil and Argentina.

Why does this matter? Because there’s a US$ 35 billion database market out there, according to Wiederhold.

And as legacy, relational databases prove to be inadequate for the Big Data era, database vendors who have been dominant up until now (hello Oracle) will likely lose market share to new NoSQL contenders and a multi-billion market will emerge; in fact some say this is already happening. Needless to say, Couchbase wants a huge chunk of it and having a foot in the door in as many places as possible is a smart move.

Wiederhold says that in a great many cases, Couchbase is now winning evaluations against its two main competitors, MongoDB and DataStax (the commercial vendor behind Apache Cassandra) because of its ease of scalability and performance. There’s no doubt that, if asked, the other companies would make similar claims.

We’ll leave it to the VCs to bet on the winner, if there needs to be only one. The NoSQL database space is full of opportunity and there will be room enough for more than one vendor for a very long time.

10gen, The MongoDB Company, Changes Its Name

Hip, hip, hooray! 10Gen the MongoDB company, is changing its name to MongoDB, Inc. This is a wonderful move. Though we know they didn’t do this to make CMSWire writers and readers happy, we are tired of writing “10Gen, the MongoDB company” and ”10Gen, the company behind MongoDB,” every time we mention MongoDB. Now we, and everyone else for that matter, can say MongoDB, Inc. and everyone will know we’re talking about the company behind Open Source MongoDB.

1+1 >2 DataWatch Closes On Panopticon Acquisition

This is the age of Big Data; we want to view it, analyze it and visualize it all from one place, in real time, be it structured, semi-structured or unstructured, whether it’s locked up in Enterprise Document Management systems, CMSs or PDFs.

And any solution around Big Data must handle the challenges around the three V’s -- high variety, high volume and high velocity -- whether the data is batch or real time.

The marriage of DataWatch’s and Panopticon’s capabilities is going to let us do exactly that, says Ben Plummer, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Strategic Alliances at DataWatch. “This is the next generation of analytics,” he adds. ”We can now offer clients capabilities around variety, velocity and visualization in real time. It makes us absolutely unique.”